Bring non-interactive screenshot options to parity with interactive ones

[yamplum]

Hi. I was looking into building a screenshot tool for Wayland similar to Flameshot, and it's my understanding that I would use the Screenshot portal for that.

When I experimented with some prototypes, I noticed that the "silent" method call (with interactive: false) significantly lacks in features compared to the interactive one. On my DE (KDE), the interactive dialogue allows to select the screenshot region, whether to include the mouse cursor, set a delay, etc., none of which are available to the other version.

This is perhaps fine for applications that just want to "take a screenshot" and don't particularly care about how it's handled, but it's very inconvenient for writing custom screengrab tools which obviously do care a lot.

The screen capture tools on Linux still lag behind the equivalent solutions on Windows (such as ShareX), and it would be helpful to have the infrastructure in order to improve on that. Would it be possible to expose some of those interactive options on the D-Bus interface to bring the methods up to parity?

I found prior discussion about this in #139, and it seems like there was some initial interest in pursuing it. Would it make sense to restart the discussion?

[orowith2os]

See how the Flameshot screenshot utility handles it; it requests access to screenshots, and from there becomes the screenshot handler. Though on GNOME, the printscrn key goes through the shell, and not the portal, so that needs some fixing somewhere.

[yamplum]

I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can tell, on Wayland Flameshot goes through the portal on DEs that are not wlroots-based.

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/blob/a447b3d672ef92acb98be996d58540e36db84e35/src/utils/screengrabber.cpp#L123-L130

[orowith2os]

On DEs that aren't wlroots-based, like GNOME, Flameshot requests access to screenshots, and it opens its UI when the screenshot is pressed - selection, editing, etc. I assume that's what you want.

[yamplum]

I don't really understand what you mean by "request access to screenshots". My point is that screenshot tools that implement their own capture/edit workflow cannot rely on the backend-provided dialogue (calling with interactive: true), but the dialogue provides more features than calling the Screenshot method with interactive: false.

[orowith2os]

Hm, I remember flameshot being able to ask for access to screenshots, and it would show whenever a screenshot is taken.... I wonder what happened to that. Revoking the permissions and rerunning it doesn't have that result anymore. It's late here, and I probably can't debug this more - but I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

[Mikenux]

@yamplum: I think Flameshot makes the request to take a fullscreen screenshot and then displays it with its tools on top. in other words, with Flameshot, you select the screen area on a fullscreen screenshot.